The Suffering Will Not Be Televised a U.S
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Introduction 1 Introduction Saving Shoshana On March 23, 2003, a convoy of the 507th Maintenance Company was attacked four days after U.S. troops entered Iraq. Unbeknownst to the participants, the event was a prologue to a classic American story about young female victims and racial politics. Nine members of the unit died and six became prisoners of war, but only one, a female POW named Jessica Lynch, was widely publicized as the face of American heroism (Fig. 1).1 Two other women might have been singled out for such attention but were not: both, unlike Private Lynch, were women of color and received slightly more attention than the men. Lori Piestewa was the fi rst woman to die in the con- fl ict and the fi rst American Indian woman to be killed in action as Figure 1. Jessica Lynch speaking after returning home. Courtesy of AP Images. 1 © 2009 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 The Suffering Will Not Be Televised a U.S. soldier, and Shoshana Johnson became the fi rst black female POW in U.S. military history. Yet it was Lynch, a blonde, petite, nineteen-year-old woman from Palestine, West Virginia, who became a star. A military-media coalition produced a movie-worthy narrative of a future kindergarten teacher who fearlessly fi red her gun until it was emptied of bullets and struggled with gun and knife wounds until her daring rescue by a military strike force.2 The “most famous soldier of the Iraq War,” she appeared in more news broadcasts than the general running the war, the vice president, or the deputy defense secretary.3 She was on the cover of Time magazine and a book and television movie recounting her ordeal quickly followed her return.4 Alas, the “true story” subtitle eventually had to give way to “inspired by” disclaimers, as subsequent research showed that early reports of her abduction and rescue were highly exaggerated; her gun jammed, she was not shot, and her “rescue” was facilitated by Iraqis from a hospital that had been emptied of oppositional forces.5 Despite public revelations and critiques—even from Lynch herself—about the embellished, romantic narrative that initially cir- culated, stories fostered in a U.S. imaginary about plucky damsels rescued by American warriors served to divert attention for a brief time from more complex questions about the war.6 Critics from a variety of political perspectives condemned this story for diverting attention from controversy about whether the nation should have gone to war, and it appears to be a perfect example of political misdirection. However, the politically suspect nature of what the story was used for is a less important issue in the context of my argument than why the media and military coalition deemed Lynch such an appropriate object of sympathy. An obvious question, which ostensibly may seem to have obvious answers, is this: why did Jessica Lynch become the face of the confl ict? Why not any of the men? Why not the dead or more seriously wounded? Why not Lori Piestewa or Shoshana Johnson? Answering these questions requires attentiveness to the complicated calculus that results in some victims being privileged and others overlooked in U.S. culture. In The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, I argue that some stories of African American women’s suffering in the late-twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries are widely circulated and others dwell in obscurity. African American women are frequently illegible as sympathetic objects for media and political concern, and unpacking the difference between the widely disseminated suffering stories and © 2009 State University of New York Press, Albany Introduction 3 the invisible ones demonstrates why some stories of suffering gain prominence and others never gain a national stage. African American women have struggled to gain political currency against narratives that often exclude them from stories about proper victims, and when they are visible, it is often because they powerfully illustrate one or more of the conventions in sentimental political storytelling. In the United States, the logic that determines who counts as proper victims has historically been shaped by sentimental politics—the practice of telling stories about suffering bodies as a means for inciting political change. Sentimental political storytelling describes the narrativization of sympathy for purposes of political mobilization. It is key if people want to mobilize sympathy and have what I call affective agency—the ability of a subject to have her political and social circumstances move a populace and produce institutional effects. Thus an easy and not inaccurate analysis of the Lynch story is that affect could be mobilized for her because she is a white, photogenic female whose origins from a small town in West Virginia conformed to a familiar narrative about hardworking Americans uplifting them- selves through work and service.7 This simple answer, however, does not fully explain the relationship between race, gender, and stories of suffering. There are clearly gendered and racial politics at work. Gendered politics ensure the erasure of the dead and wounded bodies of boys and men because manly sacrifi ce is expected in armed confl ict. While an excess of dead male bodies can provoke outrage, it can take a great deal for the country to mobilize around an individual lost male soldier. While there have been high-profi le male heroes,8 individual male citizens are so frequently killed that their assaulted bodies are rarely sensationalized. Indeed, some of the male soldiers who received the most attention in the second confl ict in Iraq were represented by (white) mothers mourning their loss.9 Their invisibility here—other than as a part of the larger entity of “our troops” who should be supported—gestures to the intricate logic shaping when masculinity is utilized in the hero/victim dichotomy. Racial and gender politics demonstrate that in the logic of mobilizing affect—the motivation of emotion that is a necessary prerequisite to social and political action—citizens often negotiate an economy that privileges white female bodies, but even privileg- ing white femininity has an elaborate history. Jessica Lynch’s story was not only about an innocent, patriotic young “girl” (a youthful designation frequently used to describe her), it was also about the © 2009 State University of New York Press, Albany 4 The Suffering Will Not Be Televised faceless, heroic soldiers who saved her. White female bodies have historically mobilized affect as subjected bodies in need of rescue or as moral voices who generate sympathy; women and their advocates have utilized this problematic privileging of white womanhood as has the state. These bodies can also be the means by which national rhetoric about victims, villains, and heroes are constructed. This is a problematic mechanism for political action—subjects are seen as in need of rescue in relation to how close they are to white female bodies. Citizens often warrant sympathy because they are white female victims, close to the hearts of white women, needing to be protected like white women, or working in the service of the white nuclear family. As Saidiya Hartman has argued, “it is the white or near-white body” that can make “suffering visible and discernible.”10 Such privileging makes it diffi cult for women of color to become idealized victims in the U.S. imaginary and limits the possibility that citizens like Lori Piestewa and Shoshana Johnson could be taken up as national heroes. Regardless of whether or not one thinks Lynch should have been made a national heroine, the incident pushes us to interrogate the possibility of mobilizing affect for other kinds of bodies. Can this privileging of whiteness be circumvented? Under what conditions can a body of color become iconographic? In this case, the military needed a living body that could bolster the support of the country for war. Part of what made Lynch’s story signifi cant is that her capture gave the military and media a contained story that could narrativize a triumph with a clear end. Such romantic closure was important in what already appeared would become a longer confl ict than the president’s administration had initially suggested. Lori Piestewa was killed and could no longer function in an uplifting story, and the men’s value—as I have explained—was limited. If we are left with the option of the other woman, what could have made Shoshana Johnson’s terrifi ed, captive visage an iconographic image in the early days of the war (Fig. 2)? Was it because, as some suggested, she did not look like a supermodel and was not read as “cute”?11 Without conceding to subjective aesthetic evaluations about either woman’s appearance, can we believe that being a captured black girl read as “pretty” is all it takes to become the most famous soldier of the war? Would the fi lm on NBC have been entitled Saving Shoshana instead of Saving Jessica Lynch? If we were to market a story about John- son—African American, outside of traditional Western paradigms of © 2009 State University of New York Press, Albany Introduction 5 Figure 2. Shoshana Johnson, the fi rst African American female POW, was ini- tially discussed in relationship to the other soldiers in her unit. Courtesy of AP Images. beauty, with a biography as a black single mother that automatically triggers criticism—how would we tell the tale so that she could be an object of sympathy and receive state and media attention? This book explores how African American women negotiate the privileging of whiteness, but reveals that their subversion of the status quo requires more than adherence to Western standards of beauty; it has entailed an assertive utilization of historical sentimental narratives about suffering in the United States.